My S9's don't like the cold at all.
I ran the fans at 85% to keep the chip temps down.
First frost we had in the UK had hash boards go missing in the GUI and some weird behaviour.
Set the fans to auto let them warm up and all was good again.
You can't win with these but fingers crossed apart from this I've had no problems.
Guess I'm lucky but I'm not looking forward to when they do break, long way to ROI yet.

I've not tried NH infact this was my first rental.
MRR worked but the hash rate was under advertised.
I read every rental gets checked after and reviewed on completion so hope I get a bit back.
All my rentals just finished so now we need that block.....

I've rented from https://www.miningrigrentals.com/.

I tried a 50th rental and it was a disaster.
Started off on a USA node then I think some how I got banned from the node.
Maybe because I just thrashed the guys node with 50th, he maybe firewalled me out.
He was only running a small amount of g/h so I think I spoilt his private party.
Then went to P2Pool.org out of sheer panic.
Then the rental broke down and went off line so I got a refund in the end.
20 minutes of hell for my first ever rental.

So next I got 20 th from Germany and Aimed it straight at my own node in the U.K.
Then 2 hrs later sent another 19 th from Germany to my node.

My node is holding out exceptionally well (75th) so I'm pleased with the current result.

I've looked at the time between blocks and just rolled the dice and gone "now".
As you say, if the shares stay in the chain long enough then hopefully payout rises.
Again assuming the rentals find shares.
It's just picking the time to ramp up then for the pool to get the block, assuming it does.

As you said the other day, changing things could have a bearing on luck so let's see.
If this kind of guess prediction works I might have the guts to rent a couple of ph for 24 hrs and see what that does.
Stealing your ideas.

The contents of this thread have been invaluable.
Still very much up to date and working.
Carefully reading this thread got me a good working node and background knowledge of how it works.
Thanks people.

Hey PublicP2poolNode.
Im giving your strategy a quick trial.
I think (rather hope) that the pool might grab a block in the next day or so.
Ive just managed to rent 50TH to throw at a node over in the states.
If this can get some shares in the next 12 hours and we get a block after that, hopefully it might work.
Wish me luck.

OK so I finally figured it out in my head.

On my Antminer Status Pages.
My S7's had settled after 3 hours at 9.15K Diff, with the actual being 9152 over on the Right Hand side, LSDiff box.
My S9's had settled after 3 hours at 16.4K Diff, with the actual being 16384 over on the Right Hand side, LSDiff box.

Im sure that LSDiff is the difficulty last sent to the miner by the pool.

So for now I simply went +9152 on the S7's and +16384 on the S9's.
On a restart they get straight down to business at 9.15K and 16.4K respectively.

Ill see how this affects things over the next couple of hours.

So as in2tactics suggested, those upper figures are sweet.
Thanks again.

Thank you very much sir.
Ill bash these in now and see what happens.

I cant get my head around the + thing just yet .......

P2POOL could do with a booster, if your moving away from Antpool.

Any suggestion for a + figure for an S7 and an S9.

I finally got my new node running on a pretty quick rack server, and its sitting on an Ethernet leased line at work, rather than my crappy home broadband.
Im still tweaking at the moment and the node restarts start the miners off from scratch again so a + figure (or method to work it out) would be appreciated.

Got a domain name as well now so take a look or give it a try (latency dependent) i guess.  ukp2pool.uk:9332

Ive gone back to P2POOL mining, where I started a good while ago.

Ive mined at kano.is for a good few months this year, hit on their lucky streak and it paid very well.
Its a great pool, kano is a true professional and the pool is well run.

I just cant keep away from p2pool though.

I run my own p2pool node in the same building as my miners so p2pool is kind of running your own pool, nearly.
I have to keep an eye on the node (running under Centos as I love linux) and you can tweak things with bitcoind and p2pool.
So you do have some work to do almost as your own system admin.

Payouts are varied. At the moment the pool gets a block in the region of three to four days between so variance is large.
Could be longer, could be shorter. Who knows.
Its almost solo mining but not exactly if that makes any sense.

Payouts are slightly more than I normally earn on any other pool.
The slightly more makes it worth my while.

Incidentally i am running 2 X S7's and 2 X S9's, same as you.

If the variance doesn't bother you and you don't mind waiting a while for a payout, p2pool is probably the way to go.
Its tempting to jump ship after a couple of days but if you work out everything you earn over say six months, it should (normally does) just earn that little bit more.

With p2pool patience is definitely a virtue.

Hmm, feel an idiot somehow 9333 got lost in iptables.
Ive corrected this so hopefully 9333 should be open to the network now.

EDIT
Yes, getting incoming connections now.

Yes, ive got 8333, 9332 and 9333 open in the fire wall and port forwarded straight to the box.
Ive been reading and working through the post here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153232.0
Just wont accept any incoming connections.
Ive also passed --max-conns 10 --outgoing-conns 6 over to P2Pool but it never seems to connect more than 4 during running.

Thanks for taking a look, I did some more adjustments yesterday dinner time which seem to have improved on the node.
Pretty much now I might as well wait until the new server arrives and I can get it loaded and running at the office.
This node is pretty much just a learning curve.

Thanks again!

Hey PublicP2Pool node.

I'm currently running a test node on some old hardware here

http://81.131.94.77:9332/static/

I should have a decent rack server come Tue / Wed this week that can go into the Server room at work with my Miners on the same sub net in the same building.

I want my own node to mine to (approx 34 th/s) but I'll also make this a public node.
I have a much better internet connection at work (leased line) and faster routers and switch.

If I need a little help with trimming the settings on the node any chances you can offer me some help please?

I'll work through the P2Pool guide on the forum first but would appreciate any help to get me up and running.
I'm kind of hoping that running my own node next to the Miners should take my latency really low, but then I need to trim bitcoind and P2Pool to get the shares out quick before they orphan.

Nice amount of hash you keep chucking at the pool by the way!

Yep I'm aware of that. Figure p2Pool might even activate before the rest of the network as well.
Guess that's something I'm going to have to go with to stick with P2Pool.

I got a test node running at

http://81.131.94.77:9332/static/

It's not been tweaked for efficiency as it's running on my Centos box at home.
Slow processor, lack of memory slow hard drives.
At least I can get it up and running, I've got a half broken S7 mining to it now.
Gives me a few days to play around with it until the new rack server arrives on Tuesday.
Once that's in I'll use a spare IP at the office and it can sit on our leased line and on the same subnet as my Miners.
Then I can get down to some serious tweaking.

Cool, enjoying the ride.

Thanks for the info.

I will go with classic as in my mind it's a better solution to Segwit and cores principles.
Please don't thrash me over this one. I'm still reading about Segwit but it seems to begin to steer ownership towards core of the network.

The new hardware never arrived this week so I'll have to wait a couple more days into the new year.
I hashed up Ubuntu on an old office PC and started to get things working but nah the processors having none of it.
Until then I'll keep mining to another node.

Hi folks. Is there any issue running classic as the backend for P2Pool or does it need to be core?
Just I am upgrading a rack server this week at work during the holiday and the old box will be reprovisioned as a uk node.
Something I've wanted to do for a while to lower my latency and we have a direct Ethernet comnection at work so probably makes sense.

Cool, I'll gladly share my findings with you real soon.
I'm waiting on 5 cards to arrive.

54's sir. I have early batch Miners and those are the ones I want to keep going for a little longer.
I'm 50/50 just to scrap the lot but I'm still profitable at the moment.
I spent a lot of time working on the SP20's but then they only had a couple of chips per board.

I need to spend some time on the Bitmain gear now to learn it's inner workings then I rekkon I can move onto the S9 hash cards next year.

Thanks for the reply.

Cool Sidehack, any help would be great.

I might try some de-potting agent on the black epoxy im sure we have a few gallons left here from when we were repairing some weatherproof control boxes.
As for the white, Ill pull the home made sandwich toaster hot box out and cook the boards in that for a while see if that softens them.
I dont really want to bugger up the pre-heater with dripping epoxy as my boss might not be to happy about that.

Ill have to cook up another batch of acetone with some epsom salts to remove the moisture from it so I have no moisture involved.

If you have anything on the ASIC locations that would be a bonus or its gonna be a few long days of track tracing to work it out.
I have the data sheet on the ASICS so hopefully the chained data bus is an external layer on the board, but more than likely hidden away inside some place.

Thanks!

Do yourself a favour and open her up and drop out the hash cards.
Check for loose heat sinks (they wobble).

If you have loose heat sinks, go careful with her and as philip said above, unless you live in the antarctic and next to a nuclear power station, dont try and go for 1.7 th/s or it will end horribly.

If you need any help let me know, I know the SP20's inside out!